Len Lawson earned a B.S. in Business Administration (Management option) from Winthrop University and an M.A. in English from National University. He has been accepted to the Ph.D. in English Literature & Criticism program at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. He currently teaches writing and literature at Central Carolina Technical College. His scholarly article "Back to the Future: Approaches to Best Practices in Reflective Teaching" appeared in Cultivating Visionary Leadership by Learning for Global Success: Beyond the Language and Literature Classroom (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015). He is a Poetry Reader and Book Reviewer for Up the Staricase Quarterly. Len is co-founder of the Poets Respond to Race initiative and co-editor of its upcoming first anthology (Muddy Ford Press). He is a Pushcart Prize nominee, a three-time Best of the Net nominee, and a 2016 Callaloo Fellow. He won the 2016 Jasper Magazine Artist of the Year Award in Literary Arts. He has been a finalist for the inaugural Berfrois Poetry Prize, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, and the Yellow Chair Review Chapbook Prize. His poetry has also been and will be featured in coffee shops and transit buses in the Columbia, SC metro area, selected by Columbia Poet Laureate Ed Madden. He has poems appearing or forthcoming in several anthologies and journals including Callaloo, [PANK], The James Franco Review, Winter Tangerine Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, and Charleston Currents, selected by South Carolina Poet Laureate Marjory Wentworth. His website is www.lenlawson.co.